Monday, August 13, 2012

Prior to his arrest, Pickard was a drug dealer. In 2010, Pickard took aim and fired several shots at a rival drug dealer on a crowded street in southwest Philadelphia.

One bullet hit Deshaown Brown, age 2 at the time. Another bullet hit his older brother, Joseph Brown, age 8. The two boys were playing in their front yard.

Philadelphia PD detectives went to extreme efforts to put together the criminal case against Pickard. They had to do so with little to no cooperation from area residents or witnesses, who are intimidated by (or advocates of) the "Stop Snitching" culture that dominates much of urban America.

The end result?

Kevin Pickard was given a 5 to 10 year sentence. Considering predominant trends in the Pennsylvania justice system, it is very likely that Pickard will only face a 5 year sentence. Pickard will also be given credit for the time he spent behind bars awaiting trial. Thus, Pickard will likely be released in 3 years.

Who is Judge Lisette Shirdan-Harris? She has been a Court of Common Pleas Judge since 2006. She has been given awards and citations by the National Organization of Women, the Tuskegee Alumni Club, is the past President of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, and is currently on the board of the Forum of Executive Women. Prior to her career in law, she was a "cultural diversity instructor" at United Airlines.

She was brought into office thanks to campaign funding from the Laborers District Council Local 322 in Philadelphia, as well as several other Building Trades Unions in the city.

What would her numbers have looked like without the backing of LDC Local 332?
“She would have lost absolutely,” said Staten Sr. the union’s president. “She
would have had no chance of winning. She wasn’t known and she was new to the
field.”

She then joined the Laborers’ District
Council Prepaid Legal Fund in 1999, where she oversaw the disbursement
of a $3.5 million benefit fund to providers of legal services
representing 6,000 construction union members. She remained in this role
until joining the Court of Common Pleas in 2006.

So how did Shirdan-Harris justify her lenient sentence? Apparently, Pickard was in the process of "turning his life around".

In brief remarks before sentencing, Shirdan-Harris said she had taken
note of letters in support of Pickard. One from a recreation center
leader said Pickard had plans to start a basketball league.

Yes, Pickard shot two defenseless children, one of whom was a toddler.
Yes, he was a drug dealer who intimidated and terrorized residents in
his area. These facts are not in question, as Pickard pleaded guilty
during court proceedings. However, he claims to have had plans to start a basketball league at a local park, a contribution to society which clearly trumps all else in the eyes of the Philadelphia (in)justice system.

The social infrastructure in Philadelphia is failing (as is the physical infrastructure, but that's another, albeit related, story). Key to that is the total breakdown in the judicial system. Policing measures become useless and pointless if there does not exist a judicial system to mete out punishment to criminals, and that is what has happened in the city of Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Inquirer published a startling exposé of the judicial system in Philadelphia, one in which the system spends untold taxpayer resources to coddle and protect criminals while utterly ignoring the needs of victims and witnesses ... Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied.

Go read it now if you want a taste of what awaits many other cities in America that are being driven into the ground by corruption and liberal policies that advocate leniency for criminals and that dismiss advocacy of "law and order" as the product of racism or paranoia.

So why do liberals seem to hate Matt Drudge? Why do liberals consider his website so racist? After all, his website only very rarely includes original content. The Drudge Report is primarily made up of links to other news websites, most of which are safely within the confines of what is typically referred to as the "mainstream media" (think ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, CNN, etc).

Liberals hate Matt Drudge because his website continually highlights liberalism's historic failure to improve the social and economic conditions that the majority of America's Black population finds itself in.

Drudge often spotlights incidents of Black crime. Drudge often includes stories that describe the depressed economic conditions, government corruption and crumbling state of physical infrastructure that is endemic to cities like Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta. Drudge often posts links to stories that point out the near-total dissolution of the family (and other traditional social support networks) in poor, minority-heavy, urban areas.

This is a major threat to liberalism.

Liberals have governed most of America's major metro areas for decades and in many major cities (Chicago being a great example) liberals have total monopolistic control over municipal governance. The Democratic Party today is anchored by social liberalism (unlike the 1930 - 1965 period when it was anchored by left-wing economics) and social liberalism has vociferously fought against traditional social institutions like the nuclear family and the church and slandered anyone who supports these institutions with terms like "patriarchal" and "fundamentalist." The majority of teacher's unions in this nation are in alliance with the Democratic Party.

When Drudge reminds readers about the degraded conditions in which Black America lives, it turns the tables and puts liberals in the "hot seat." It forces liberals to take accountability for liberalism's inability to live up to its promise of redressing social and economic inequality, even after forty-plus years of rule. After several decades, the liberal insistence that more subsidies, more funding and more social liberalism are the keys to social betterment has begun to sound hollow to many Americans. Liberals would rather sweep this ugly reality under the rug and construct a fantasy narrative wherein liberal mayors, liberal teachers and liberal social institutions bear zero responsibility for these failures. Instead, responsibility is passed on to the Tea Party, white people who died several hundred years ago and other people with no discernible influence over present-day urban policy making. The Drudge Report is the needle that bursts this fantasy bubble regularly.

This, in turn, stokes so-called "white guilt" and sharpens the demographic divisions with the Democratic Party itself. Alexa.com indicates that the typical Gawker reader is (1) young, (2) disproportionately female, (3) overwhelmingly white, (4) higher-income, and (5) highly-educated. A quick review of the website indicates that support for homosexual rights and feminism are the paramount political positions among the readership. The possibility that social liberalism has played a major role in the destruction of Black America is too terrible to contemplate for the Gawker demographic. It suggests that they are personally responsible for or personally benefit from racial inequality. It suggests that the demographic alliance(s) underpinning the Democratic Party are fragile and weak. Reflexive accusations of racism and ad hominem attacks on Matt Drudge himself offer an easy escape.

Because Drudge so rarely offers personal commentary and instead relies on third-party news (many from otherwise liberal outlets), he is quite difficult for liberals to argue against. This provokes the irrational, visceral reactions of intense hatred that we sometimes see. Liberals can not admit that their real objection to his website is the "type" of news story that Drudge links to, so they rely on superficial arguments about the images he chooses, the headlines he writes and the way in which he contextualizes stories on his page, and completely sidestep the socio-political questions that the content in these stories should provoke instead.